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The greatest living Englishmen

In the mid-1880s, at the very height of the Victorian era, the Pall Mall Gazette polled its readers to discover who were considered to be the Greatest Living Englishmen.

Just to be clear: the term English at this point was widely used as the adjective to describe the United Kingdom; it didn’t exclude the Welsh, Irish or Scottish. On the other hand, the gender implication was clearly observed – otherwise, surely, Queen Victoria or Florence Nightingale would have rated a mention somewhere.

Votes were invited in ten separate categories, and the winners – as announced in 1885 – were as follows:

It should be noted that the Statesman category specifically excluded William Gladstone, since it was taken as read that the Grand Old Man would win at a canter. In his absence, this category produced the narrowest of all margins of victory, Joseph Chamberlain running Salisbury a close race.

The biggest winner, meanwhile, was Henry Irving, who massively outpolled all would-be pretenders to the title of top thespian.

Also worth noting is the Humbug division, where the Tichborne Claimant was pursued hard by the ill-matched pair of Oscar Wilde and General William Booth, the Founder of the Salvation Army.

And, in terms of what it says about the priorities of the time, it’s noticeable that writing, novels, art and acting are covered, but there’s no room for music. Nor for engineering. Meanwhile soldiers are to be considered, but not sailors.

Various other publications followed the Pall Mall Gazette in running readers’ polls on the Greatest Living Englishmen. None of them are quite as informative, since they don’t break the names down into categories. But out of interest, here are some from the turn of the twentieth century.

By this stage, the impact of the Boer War is unavoidable: not only the military commanders Kitchener and Roberts, but also Alfred Milner, the High Commissioner to South Africa, the man who did so much to provoke the Boers in the first instance. And indeed the surgeon Frederick Treves, recognized here presumably for his work in a field hospital in South Africa, rather than for his role in the story of the Elephant Man (in which capacity he was portrayed by Anthony Hopkins in David Lynch’s best film).